Lumia 1520 brings quad-core to WinPho

November 18, 2013

Transcript

With the Nokia Lumia 1520, Nokia and Microsoft have embraced the trend of supersized screen.
I'm Jessica Dolcourt for CNET and this is your first look.
Now, this phone is notable for two reasons.
One is the extra large size and the other is that it is the first Windows phone to use a quad-core processor, but more on that later because first, I wanna talk about the design.
The 1520 has a unibody design that is nice and sleek.
There's a nice little boarder around
the screen, so it's not gappy at all.
One thing you will notice is that there are two doors that you have to open with a SIM card key.
The bottom one is for the nano SIM and the top one is for a micro SD card slot and that will take up to 64 gigabytes an external storage.
Now, how comfortable you find the phone to hold and use and even carry around with you is gonna depend on a lot of things like the size of your hands, the size of your pocket and the size of whatever else you're carrying it in.
The phone did fit well into my hand when I was just holding it but it's a lot harder for me to
use for one handed operation.
It's very awkward and I notice that I had to stretch my thumb around a lot in order to reach it.
It's also really hard for me to reach other areas on the screen.
So, this is definitely the phone that you're gonna wanna use with two hands unless you have very large mitts.
It also did not fit very well into my pockets but I did find that it fit into the cellphone pocket of my purse.
The screen itself is a very large 6 inches.
Believe it or not, that puts it sort of in the middle feel, larger than some but definitely not the biggest phablet that you're gonna find
around.
It's got a 1080p HD resolution.
Also has Nokia's clear black display filter, so that means it's gonna be a little bit easier to read outside in broad daylight or some automatic settings you can put on that will change the brightness when you go outdoors and when you come back in.
Since the phone is so large, one thing you'll notice is a 3rd column that Microsoft has added here for phones at this size.
Live tiles will still only stretch two column with slide, not the full area but you have a lot more room to play with.
You can see many more icons on this large screen than you can
on any of the smallest screen phones.
The 1520 is running Windows Phone 8 Update 3 right out on the box.
It's got a lot of apps for you preloaded including Nokia apps, AT&T apps and a couple others besides.
Now, one of the phone's claims to fame is the 20-megapixel camera on here.
This does use the PureView Technology.
Most of the time your photos will resolve to 5 megapixels, like if you updated online or send them to your friend.
However, the 20-megapixel image can be useful if you're gonna do a lot of lassos cropping and if you want,
print a full size image.
As usual, you can't switch from the default, Nokia camera apps, any other lens including the native Windows phone camera.
There are a lot of photo tools, filters and extra fun apps that you can use for the most part.
Even on automatic mode, I found that the pictures were pretty good.
There's also the typical Windows phone camera button.
This is something that you can hold and press to trigger the camera.
You can also press it as a shutter button, you can use on screen controls as well.
As I mentioned before, the 1520 is the first
Windows phone to come with a quad-core processor.
You're looking at a 2.2 gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chip set.
Other specs include LTE and NFC of course.
The pricing is pretty reasonable for a phone on this size, $200 on AT&T with a new 2-year service agreement.
Overall, I really like the phone's design.
I think it's light and slim and attractive.
I especially like this red color.
I think it's pretty easy to handle too.
The specs are topnotch, it doesn't have every single whistle and bell that you're gonna find on some of the other advanced
Android phones.
But if you don't need all of these then I can recommend this device.
This is the Nokia Lumia 1520, I'm Jessica Dolcourt for CNET, you can check out my full review at CNET.com.